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This was posted by Philip Winn at the Boar’s Head Tavern about a year ago. It’s some of the best commentary on submission in marriage I’ve ever read. Marriage is to be modeled on the love of the holy Trinity. But people forget that the trinity is a mystery. How is the love of marriage supposed to be any less mysterious? As he mentions, it’s almost like part of the trick is to not think about it too much. I’m not an egalitarian, but the more we try to define or systematize what submission and headship looks like, the less it actually end up looking trinitarian, which is still mysterious. (emphasis mine below)

Submission post-fall is an interesting thing. Looking at the model of the Trinity tells us a lot of how things are likely to be at the end of time, but doesn’t seem to help much when it comes to the here and now

The thing about the mutual submission of the Trinity is that God is worthy of submission. That is, the Father could elevate Christ because Christ is worthy of elevation, Christ could undergo humiliation to point to the Father because the Father is entirely faithful and trustworthy, and so on. The thing that makes submission difficult in human relationships is that the husband (going with the gender roles at hand) is often completely unworthy of submission in any objective sense.

If I were perfect, I don’t think the question of submission would ever even have come up between us. If my wife were perfect, I’d have no problem submitting to her in everything. The problem is that neither of us are perfect!

I remember seeing this lived out when I was a young lad, and I saw families utterly destroyed by — from my admittedly youthful perspective — this submission issue. Take a couple I knew in which a money-savvy woman was married to a man with zero financial acumen; after being told she needed to submit all things to her husband, including the family budget, she turned it over to him. The same teacher convinced him he had to take care of it himself. The wife wasn’t allowed to pester or nag him, either. I guess the theory was that he would rise to the challenge, especially with the wife’s confident support. That isn’t what happened, of course; their finances were utterly destroyed by the husband’s bumbling, and when she finally resumed management, they both felt that they were somehow failing God. The whole thing seemed bizarre to me at the time, and still does. If she’s better with money, why on earth would he be required to manage the budget? Have these people never read Proverbs 31?

Of course, that’s a problem with application, not theory. But of course that’s the rub. It’s easy to say “submit” in theory, but what do you say to the woman whose husband is a complete loser? Or abusive? I’ve heard people say that submission should be complete and total regardless of the worthiness of the husband, and that bruises and scars and suffering will be somehow credited in heaven. This may be true, but it hardly seems to be what Jesus or Paul had in mind, and I don’t think it is related in any way to what we see in the Trinity.

It’s one thing to say that well, there are problems when the husband is an unbeliever. But we’re all unbelievers! We are all enemies of God, rescued despite ourselves, continually struggling to surrender to God and conform to His ways. The difference between that wife-beating drunk and me is one of degree, not substance. The degree is important (don’t stay with a wife-beater, ladies, please!), but sweeping the issues that are still present in my relationship under the rug isn’t kosher.

For the record, my wife and I have never particularly struggled with this. To external observers, I suppose it looks like she submits to me and I love her, in obedience to scripture. Just between you and me, that really isn’t our intention. I love her and she loves me. I consider her and she considers me. We agree on most things anyway, and the rest can easily go one way or the other on any given issue. She submits to me and I to her, but not because of any gender roles — at least not intentionally — but because the submission is a natural result of our mutual love.

And of course, we’re broken people, so it doesn’t always go so smoothly as I’ve just described.

I have to say that the majority of couples I know that talk about submission as an important biblical principle are semi-psycho. Not all, and not dangerously so (except maybe to their children), but it’s creepy and unhealthy. On the other hand, the majority of couples I know that seem to make life work well don’t ever talk about submission on their own, and when asked will generally say its unimportant.

(This is generally also my experience.)

I have ideas about what Paul is talking about, and why, and I think it all makes good sense, but I don’t think that most people writing about submission on the net are anywhere close to on-target on the issue. Life may work very well for them and their spouses, but it’s impossible to give any advice on the internet without it being taken too far by a large percentage of readers.

On the early group of American’s trying to travel and meet with coffee growers to find good coffee:

Back in 2001, Peter [Guiliano of Counter Culture Coffee], and Geoff [Watts of Intelligentsia], had not idea how all [of their travelling] would develop. In fact, they didn’t know much except that they were deperate to get their hands on great coffee. “We were bewildered by all we had to learn as coffee buyers, and we were making it up as we went along,” remembers Peter. “When you are faking it, you work extra hard. You don’t want to be exposed as a fraud. That drove a lot of us at this time.”

-God in a Cup, p.69

The best people though can make it up as they go along. I’m in a room full of people right now who are faking it, but that’s OK. Eventually they won’t be faking it anymore. This is why learning how to LEARN is worth a lot more than technical training in a specific field. This is why studying classic literature is maybe help you be a good welder more than taking a skills class on welding. The one will give the fish and the other will teach you how to go get your own fish. You have to work hard to fake it, but it’s not being dishonest unless you intend to just sit on your butt. How do you learn anything? By just jumping in and doing it.

I love the story about Walt Disney as a young man. It goes something like this: He was broke and looking for a job. A circus band he knew of needed a trombone player. Walt told asked the leader for the job, without telling him he’d never played a trombone before. After it became clear he didn’t know what he was doing, the band leader asked why he didn’t tell him he’d never played before. He said, “Hey, I didn’t know if I could play it or not. I’d never tried.”

I think it must be tragic if one is very old before they are able to say this. Even worse to die fighting.

There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all. There must be a time of day when the man who has to speak falls very silent. And his mind forms no more propositions, and he asks himself: Did they have a meaning? there must be a time when the man of prayer goes to pray as if it were the first time in his life he had ever prayed; when the man of resolutions puts his resolutions aside as if they had all been broken, and he learns a different wisdom: distinguishing the sun from the moon, the stars from the darkness, the sea from the dry land, and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.

-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, Ch.16 Sec.11

As fallen men, we are apt to love the law. Not in the Psalm 119 “Oh how I love your law” way, but in a way that just throws gas on the fire of our fallen nature. And so, it’s a curse. The nature of God is wrapped up in it, since it DOES describe what is truly right and wrong, but it only serves to condemn us. When we embrace it and hate others with it, we are embracing death, besides (obviously) hypocrisy.

Merton addresses the Pharisee’s here.

The Pharisee…practiced many virtues, but lied before God because he thought his piety made him better than other men. He despised sinners, and worshiped a false god who despised them like himself.

-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, Ch.3 Sec.12

The pharisee who splits hairs and rationalizes his way out of these chances for self-dedication [serving other people], although he may theorize and dogmatize about the will of God, never fully does that will for he never really abandons himself to the influence of divine charity.

-Ch.4 Sec.10

Here, Merton rejects strict predestination theology on the basis that it is too philosophical and cannot be described adequately if you limit yourself to the kind of language found in the bible.

Our vocation is not a supernatural lottery but the interaction of two freedoms, and, therefore, of two loves. It is hopeless to try to settle the problem of vocation outside the context of friendship and of love. We speak of Providence: that is a philosophical term. The Bible speaks of our Father in Heaven. Providence is, consequently, more than an institution, it is a person.

-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, Ch.8 Sec.1

I add that an elemental part of the human soul is highly offended by the notion that our place in life (social, vocational, salvational, you name it, everything) is nothing more than the result of a cosmic lottery. At the moment of conception in the womb, the great roulette wheel in the sky in spun. Pray it doesn’t land on 00. Is it just our sinful nature that finds this offensive? Is it just our American independance folding it’s arms in front of the sovereign triune God? Don’t answer so fast. What if it is actually the imago dei reacting to this instead!?

Merton says some interesting things here:

Secrecy and solitude are values that belong to the very essence of personality. A person is a person insofar as he has a secret and is a solitude of his own that cannot be communicated to anyone else. If I love a person, I will love that which most makes him a person: the secrecy, the hiddenness, the solitude of his own individual being, which God alone can penetrate and understand. A love that breaks into the spiritual privacy of another in order to lay open all his secrets and besiege his solitude with importunity does not love him: it seeks to destroy what is best in him, and what is most intimately his.

-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, Ch.15 Sec.3

Several thoughts come to mind. One is that there is a certain amount of personal space that is necessary for even the closest relationships. When you other person tries to invade it, it isn’t love and closeness anymore. I think this is because of the fall. It is impossible in our fallen state to really know and commune with each other personally. I think in glory (in the new heaven and new earth) we will be. That is why there is no marriage. There is no death.

Thinking in terms of the larger limits of humanity, I can’t help think of Neon Genesis Evangelion. No, you shouldn’t take anime too seriously, but one of the themes in the show is that all human beings have an “AT Field” (Absolute Terror) field that protects our inner most heart/soul and allows it to have form. The bad guys (kind of) are trying to take humanity to the next stage in it’s evolution and merge everyone into one essence ala “Childhoods End”, Arthur C. Clark style. Anyway, but when that happens, nobody is distinct anymore. We all lose our identity. In the end, our protagonist refuses to enter in, asserts himself, and causes the collapse of the evolution. He and the female lead in the story are left as the new Adam and Eve to start over. Eh, hard to explain. That and the 14-hour mini-series + movie is still mostly about fighting robots. That’s just a front for this love thing though. OK. Time to go to bed.

Merton on America and advertising:

Americans have always felt that they were protected against the advertising business by their own sophistication. If we only knew how naive our sophistication really is! It protects us against nothing. We love the things we pretend to laugh at…Sincerity becomes impossible in a world that is rules by a falsity that it thinks it is clever enough to detect. Propaganda is constantly held up to contempt, but in condemning it we come to love it after all. In the end we will not be able to get along without it.

-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, Ch.10 Sec.6

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Merton’s brilliant section of loving “society”:

Do not ask me to love my brother merely in the name of an abstraction – “society,” the “human race,” the “common good.” Do not tell me that I ought to love him because we are both “social animals.” These things are so much less than the good that is in us that they are not worthy to be invoked as motives of human love. You might as well ask me to love my mother because she speaks English.

We need abstractions, perhaps, in order to understand our relations with one another. But I may understand the principles of ethics and still hate other men. If I do not love other men, I will never discover the meaning of te “common good.” Love is, itself, the common good.

There are plenty of men who will give up their interests for the sake of “society,” but cannot stand any of the people they live with. As long as we regard other men as obstacles to our own happiness we are the enemies of society and we have only a very small capacity for sharing in the common good.

-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, (forgot the ref.)

At the end of Merton’s long passage on happiness and contentment:

Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the “one thing necessary” may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed.

It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done. In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting an immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition.

-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, Ch.7 Sec.3

Merton on being defined by who you ARE, not what you DO. I don’t know if this problem bites women as hard, but it’s a serious problem for most men.

When a man constantly looks and looks at himself in the mirror of his own acts, his spiritual double vision splits him ijto two people. And if he strains his eyes hard enough, he forgets which one is real. In fact, reality is no longer found either in himself or in his shadow. The substance has gone out of itself into the shadow, and he has become two shadows instead of one real person.

Then the battle begins. Whereas one shadow was meant to praise the other, now one shadow accuses the other. The activity that was meant to exalt him, reproaches and condemns him. It is never real enough. Never active enough. The less he is able to be the more he has to do. He becomes his own slave driver-a shadow whipping a shadow to death, because it cannot produce reality, infinitely substantial reality, out of his own nonentity.

Then comes fear. The shadow becomes afraid of the shadow. He who “is not” becomes terrified at the things he cannot do. Whereas for a while he had illusions of infinite power, miraculous sanctity (which he was able to guess at in the mirror of his virtuous actions), now it has all changed. Tidal waves of nonentity, of powerlessness, of hopelessness surge up within him at every action he attempts.

Then the shadow judges and hates the shadow who is not a god, and who can do absolutely nothing. Self-contemplation leads to the most terrible despair: the despair of a god that hates himself to death.

-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, Ch.7 Sec.2